======================================================= How to Ask Good Questions and Report Problems Well ======================================================= -Ian! D. Allen - idallen@idallen.ca - www.idallen.com If you read follow this advice I'll be able to help you more quickly. *** Find Your Own Answers *** For most questions, my job as instructor is to help *you* find the answer, not to give you the answer. Specific answers will change and become irrelevant over time, but knowing how to find an answer is always useful. You've already paid me, as a College instructor, to help you find answers. If you want me to actually *give* you the answers, that's called "private consulting" and the rates are much higher - contact me after you graduate. *** Search the Course Notes *** Many questions are not new; other people have already asked them, and I've already incorporated the answers into the course notes. Your first job, before you ask a question, is to make sure I haven't already answered it. Learn to search the course notes for your answers. You can use the page-search features of web browsers to look for keywords in web pages, and you can use "grep" at the Unix/Linux command line to search many files at once. (The "-i" and "-r" options to grep are useful.) Searching the course notes is very efficient. You might be able to use Google to find your own answer on the Internet, but often Google hasn't indexed my course notes yet so the specific information you need won't be on the Internet yet. You will also find it harder to see the specific information that I give you among the billions of web pages that Google will suggest to you for answers. Check the course notes, first. *** Be Specific *** The quality of the answer you get depends largely on how detailed and specific you are in your questions. If you have been sent to read this file, it is likely because your questions are too vague for me to answer. I can't answer a vague question such as "I can't log in - do you know why?", any more than a mechanic can answer a telephone question "My car won't start - do you know why?". You must be precise in your question, giving me as much information as you can about your situation. Things you might consider telling me when you ask a question: 1. Which assignment question are you trying to answer? 2. Where are you, physically? At a coffee shop? At home? At school (in which room or which lab at school)? 3. Where are you on the network? On wireless? Direct connect? Using a VPN? Using an ISP (NCF, TekSavvy, Rogers, Sympatico)? Cable, ADSL, or dial-up? Behind a firewall/router? Behind Network Address Translation (NAT)? Is the network working? 4. What machine and operating system are you using? Ubuntu Linux 10.4 on a Dell laptop? Windows XP on a home-built desktop machine? 5. What program(s) are you using? Command-line FTP? PuTTY version 0,60? Firefox 3.1? DOS window FTP? What version? 6. What, exactly, did you enter into the program? That includes exact addresses, names, etc. Tell me what exactly you used. Saying "I entered the information from the notes" is not helpful, since perhaps the notes are wrong, or perhaps you typed it wrong. What *exactly* did you type? 7. What messages did the program(s) already give you? That includes the exact text of the messages, not what you "think" it said. Copy the exact text of what the program said in your question to me. EXAMPLES OF QUESTIONS I CANNOT ANSWER: Here are some questions that have been sent to me that I would like to answer but cannot because the poser didn't supply me with enough information to help: * "I would like to ask you that in assignment 10 I have 2 warning, so what should I do?" * "So in an attempt to do my assignments, I attempted to log to the server via PuTTy and the information posted in the weekly notes. I have previously connected to do an assignment. However, this time around it keeps giving me a time out error and won't connect me to the server. I'm not sure what more to do, is this my error or is the server down?" *** Asking Questions on the Internet *** For a slightly abusive but very thorough explanation of how to ask "smart" questions and get good answers from people on the Internet, read the classic document "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way" by Eric S. Raymond and Rick Moen: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html -- | Ian! D. Allen - idallen@idallen.ca - Ottawa, Ontario, Canada | Home Page: http://idallen.com/ Contact Improv: http://contactimprov.ca/ | College professor (Free/Libre GNU+Linux) at: http://teaching.idallen.com/ | Defend digital freedom: http://eff.org/ and have fun: http://fools.ca/